TWENTY
ORDER NOW
To connect with Debra online, please visit:
Sometimes life is the best medicine…
Defiantly uplifting, Twenty is a warm and unforgettable novel—a reminder that hope finds a way to bloom if we let it.
At age 55, Meg’s life is too filled with loss for her to remember what magic feels like. When her young daughter was killed in an accident, the strain ended Meg’s marriage. And now it’s been five years since Meg’s mother passed away. She feels like all she has left is a yard brimming with plants that are wilting in the scorching Iowa summer—and a bone-deep feeling that she’s through with living.
One night, Meg remembers a pill bottle in the back of her freezer with the number 20 on it. Containing pearl-shaped tablets, it came from her mother’s doctor before her mom died. He promised that the pills would offer her dying mother a quick, painless end in exactly twenty days. “Use the tablets only if you see a dramatic change in your mother, if her pain is unmanageable,” the doctor told her. “They’ll make her feel better. On the twentieth day, she’ll pass on peacefully.”
Meg never gave her mother the pearls. But weary from grief and ready to see her mom and daughter again, Meg takes the pearls, unsure if they’re still potent. Now that she’s decided to leave this world, Meg is rediscovering the joy in it. She sheds everything she no longer needs—possessions, regrets, guilt—and reconnects with those she cares for. Finally confronting the depth of her grief, she’s learning that love runs deeper still. But is it too late to choose to stay?
For more information about Debra Landwehr Engle, please visit her online at www.debraengle.com.
Advance Praise for Twenty
“One of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read.” – Pamela Wallace, Academy Award-winning screenwriter
“A book to hold against your heart long after the last page is turned.” – New York Times best–selling author Susan Wiggs
“Twenty reminds us to live with our hearts wide open even when they’ve been broken, and how to love even when it hurts.” – Julie Cantrell, New York Times and USA Today best–selling author of Perennials
“Written with such strong and heartfelt faith in the magic and power of never-ending love, it will renew your own.” – Judy Reene Singer, author of In the Shadow of Alabama
“Reading Twenty is like walking into what C. S. Lewis called the ‘thin place’—that land so close to Heaven, you can practically touch it. Engle takes us through an emotional struggle in which life and death are the two prizefighters, making us believe there is so much more behind the comedies and tragedies of our lives.” – David Paul Kirkpatrick, former president of Paramount Pictures, former production chief of Walt Disney Studios
